The Body Shop Christmas 2015 with Water Aid

Giving has never felt so good

Every Christmas, I buy the majority of my gifts from The Body Shop.

I love The Body Shop and I truly feel that they have something for everyone. Whether it’s an Olive set for my dad who is 70, the Camomile make-up remover range that my sister and I are obsessed with or the Tea Tree line that my nephew uses in his teens.

But why they’re always my gift destination of choice is that every year they use their profits to feed into a charitable cause.

Last week, a group of us joined The Body Shop at the Westbury Hotel for an exclusive preview of their Christmas collection.

Christmas at The Body Shop this year will support Water Aid, a charity dedicated to providing clean water for families in need.

We started our evening with a presentation from Water Aid. I was stunned to discover that 1 in 10 people in the world do not have access to clean water. It’s something that we don’t think about but we use so much water for everything. Glasses of water, the shower, the dishwasher, the washing machine, even the food we eat has been grown with the help of water.

This year, when you buy selected gifts from The Body Shop, every gift helps Water Aid to provide one day of clean water for an Ethiopian family. Their goal for the entire Christmas period is to provide clean water for 1,000 families for 10 years.

Water Aid showed us the area that the scheme is helping to fund this year with photos and quotes from local families. One family was pictured, a mother expecting a baby, a young boy and her husband. She told Water Aid that she couldn’t wait to tell her new baby how lucky they were to have been brought into a world where they would have clean water. I couldn’t believe that something we take for granted every day was something so special to this family.

People in this community have to walk six kilometres a day just to collect 20 litres dirty water. That’s the equivalent of walking the length of Oxford Street three times with the UK airport luggage allowance on your head. All of that, and to bring home dirty water.

Around 1,400 children die every day from diseases caused by dirty water and poor sanitation, that’s one child every minute.

So this year, The Body Shop have made their gift giving collection really special so that you can buy for everyone and give to a great cause along the way.

One of the stand out pieces for me was the return of the beauty advent calendar, 24 Happy Days. This comes in a regular size (£60) or deluxe sixe (£80).

My favourite Glazed Apple range is back, and buying for your brother, father or other half is completely easy now that they’ve created special sets for men.

And don’t forget that The Body Shop do amazing make-up too! I loved playing with The Sparkler, an illuminator cased in an old fashioned spritz bottle. How lovely would this be on a dresser?

To really get us into the festive spirit, we enjoyed a delicious Christmas dinner together at the Westbury and went to see Elf the Musical. I couldn’t have had a lovelier evening and in brilliant company.

The Body Shop’s Christmas collection launches in store and online this Wednesday. Kill two birds with one stone and give to both your family and someone else’s this year.